Monthly Archives: January 2016

When they were boys growing up in Michigan in 1965, Rick and Marty Lagina were to read a Reader’s Digest article that would change their lives. It was about a mysterious island off the coast of Nova Scotia called Oak Island. Many strange anomalies have been found on the island including coconut fiber buried deep underground where the nearest coconut tree is hundreds of miles away, and oak trees native to Africa mysteriously grow there and nowhere else in the region, thus the name.

Going all the way back to 1795, treasure hunters from all walks of life including FDR and John Wayne have visited the island and dug countless holes in search of riches or ancient artifacts. Theories about what can be found there range from pirate treasure to the ark of the covenant to the lost writings of Shakespeare. Since the long and considerably expensive hunt began, the search has yielded a Spanish coin dating back to 1652, rocks with strange hieroglyphs carved into them, and a system of underground shafts designed to flood out any efforts to discover what’s buried underground.

So, if someone gave you a shovel on Oak Island and asked you to start digging, where would you break ground? This interaction gives you the opportunity to explore the island and learn more about some of the key areas of interest on the island including the infamous “Money Pit”, borehole “10X”, Logan’s Cross, and the mysterious swamp off of Smith’s Cove. As Marty Lagina loves to say, “Put an X on the spot”.

Click or tap to play “Drilling Down on Oak Island”

Besides the mysterious Oak Island itself, this interaction was inspired bythis week’s e-learning challenge to create an interaction where learners can zoom in on details on a document, or in this case, a map. I used Articulate Storyline’s slider tool to reveal layers which give details on the selected region. This same approach could be employed to highlight details on a document using the slider to select the zoom region.